Heart of Steel - Meljean Brook [112]
With a clipped, “Mr. Vashon, the helm is yours,” she asked Archimedes to accompany her to the cabin, and had barely closed the door when she was on him, tearing off his clothes, desperate to kiss him enough so that the next few days wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t hurt so much, wouldn’t look so bleak. She leapt up around his waist, loved his hunger and ferocity as he pounded her back against the wall.
“Hard,” she told him. “So hard we feel it until next week.”
Pain, if nothing else. And that would have to be enough.
That would have to be enough.
Hassan appeared in a cheerful mood at dinner. Perhaps he enjoyed having his emotions castrated. Archimedes hated his own glower, his dim mood—but that would be cured soon, ha!
The older man’s gaze rested on his face for a moment, then moved to Yasmeen’s. She gingerly ate her beans one at a time, but she was moving everything gingerly. Archimedes hadn’t been getting around so easily himself. He’d never have imagined it, but it was possible that they’d actually fucked too hard.
God, what a woman she was.
He glanced at the clock. A few more hours. They’d move into range just before midnight. Christ, he felt so maudlin, as if he were waiting to die. He should be sensible, instead.
“When the tower comes down,” he said, “don’t you worry that the people will have the same reaction they did in England?—the panic, the chaos?”
Hassan shook his head. “No, it is only the symbol.”
“But when the signal suddenly stops, and they are flooded with emotion . . .” He trailed off as Hassan’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“The signal is gone. It has been these past five years.”
Next to him, Yasmeen dropped her fork. She put her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook.
Was this a joke? Archimedes stared at him. “Five years?”
“Yes. Temür reduced the signal gradually so that we wouldn’t have the same panic. A period of several years at reduced strength, then gone altogether for the past five.” Hassan gave him a strange look, as if suddenly wondering if he was talking to an idiot. Archimedes began to wonder, too. “Those towers are part of the reason the rebellion gathered such support. Why would Temür keep it on after he secured the governorship?”
“Why is the tower still up?”
“It is built on part of an old minaret, a site that many consider a tie to their past and the old religion—something from before the Horde. He did not want to antagonize the recent converts.”
“But you will?”
“It needs to fall,” Hassan said. “It is an old and valuable minaret, but Rabat would be stronger if we built something new in its place, together.”
Not a joke, then. Yasmeen lifted her face from her hands, wiping her eyes. “Oh, damn. I can barely even sit,” she cried, and then burst into laughter again, not bothering to quiet it, this time.
The older man’s eyes were bright with laughter, darting from Yasmeen to Archimedes as if he was enjoying the hilarity without fully comprehending what had happened. Then his head tilted back, as if lifted by realization. “Ah, I see. He thought the tower would affect him.”
Christ. “You talked of blowing it up, just like the Iron Duke had in England.”
“And I see that you ran full bore with the assumptions you made from that, as per usual,” Hassan said, and his laugh echoed in his air tank, reverberating through the cabin. “You fear more, you dare more—and now you love more. It will not be taken away from you in Rabat. Do you know, it was seeing what happened to you that prompted Temür to turn off the signal earlier than he intended?”
Yasmeen’s brows rose. “Truly?”
“Yes. He’d always intended to power it down, but very gradually—over a generation, perhaps. We had heard of England and did not want